Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.
I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk
A contractor showed me how to fix dents in granite with superglue. It’s totally clear. The trick is to scrape it with a razor blade at a 90 degree angle (strait horizontal). The imperfections become nearly invisible.
I've been told this is a cheap way to fix small windshield cracks. Never tried it but sounds like it would work for the small spider sized and shaped cracks from small rock impacts.
This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)
I expect something with a lot of small bubbles and cracks, also it also overheated and got weird decomposition and reactions, something like a overcooked/toasted meal. Reusing a comment that I made in a previous thread:
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).
Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).
Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.
It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.
> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.
Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:
I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.
Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.
> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.
They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.
Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.
A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.
If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.
The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.
I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.
You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.
"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.
You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.
If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.
Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.
You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.
Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.
I have read the rules are tighter in most EU nations.
There is jurisdiction shopping of course. If china or wherever wants to have really lax rules, and that means production moves there, I’m not sure what the answer is.
But, for this product (making plexiglass like things), I expect all the consumer production has gone overseas anyway. This is defense / aerospace, so it probably can’t move.
The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.
The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.
By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.
We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.
I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.
I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.
Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...
Slavery is not OK. Someone indentured for owing a debt can be compelled for a maximum of six years and goes free in the seventh, with no payment required from him.
It's ok to just treat it like a thing people say. When people say 'bless you' I don't explain to them that sneezing doesn't actually expel my soul from my body.
My parents are retired fire-fighters. They had an American pygmy goat named Bleve. Those goats commonly have very rotund stomachs[1] that look like they are about to explode.
A BLEVE does not need oxygen to become an explosion. The explosion occurs with the rupture of a tank (that has been heated, increasing the internal pressure and thus increasing the boiling point of the liquid inside, so that it remains liquid). This causes a loss of rapid loss of pressure, which in turn rapidly decreases the boiling point of the liquid, thus causing a sizable part of the liquid to almost immediately boil and cause an expanding "cloud" of gas.
When this occurs, you have an explosion that can propel parts of a steel propane tank up to 1/2 mile (at least).
It doesn't need it but it makes it that much more destructive. Your propane example is such a case - as the hot cloud expands explosively it burns on contact with new oxygen and the heat serves to further perpetuate the process. An overheated tank of propane provides an illustration of the principle on which thermobaric warheads are based.
Seems more like the miraculous grace of incompetence and no maintenance. You ever have a problem at work and you procrastinate long enough and it just sort of goes away for “reasons”? This kind of reminds me of that. Not maintaining the valve was saved by taking even worse care of the tank.
I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack?
Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.
If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas.
Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds break which then passes the stress on to the material straight after that. This all happens very quickly and can even accelerate as the hole grows bigger and gas starts moving.
It’s very lucky that the crack that formed didn’t propagate like that. It could be for many reasons though, like the crack front could have run into thicker material or a weld line or something like that and if luckily stopped the crack.
Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.
• ELIMINATE all ignition sources (no smoking, flares, sparks or flames) from immediate area.
• All equipment used when handling the product must be grounded.
• Do not touch or walk through spilled material.
• Stop leak if you can do it without risk.
• Prevent entry into waterways, sewers, basements or confined areas.
• A vapor-suppressing foam may be used to reduce vapors.
• Absorb or cover with dry earth, sand or other non-combustible material and transfer to containers.
• Use clean, non-sparking tools to collect absorbed material.
Large Spill
• Dike far ahead of liquid spill for later disposal.
• Water spray may reduce vapor, but may not prevent ignition in closed spaces.
I read that was the primary concern and wondered about drilling/piercing techniques that could avoid a spark. Spraying water sounds like the dumbest one but some kind of mud applied or something. CNC machines don’t seem to be light shows but i know very little.
I guess that begs the next point though - the high pressure system inside would want to violently vent out to the low pressure system outside through the relatively tiny hole.
Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates:
This agency is the subject of a budget war between the current executive and Congress, with the former trying to cut its budget and the Congress just restoring its budget, so not sure if it will be doing a report on Garden Grove:
> The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,
The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?
Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.
On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.
I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.
It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).
So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.
The overall point remains the same: the toxicity, both short and long term, of MMA, is comparable to lots of everyday substances that are both commonly eaten and inhaled.
It just isn't that toxic as far as chemicals go. That doesn't mean it would be like great for you but calling it "highly toxic" is tremendously overblown and doesnt serve anyone well to claim.
Let's save the highly toxic claim for things that actually deserve it. We don't have to sensationalize everything. I maintain my view that the explosion would likely be much much worse than the odds of significant respiratory damage from MMA.
Also note the sensationalization also causes placebo effect. People miles away started claiming "their lungs hurt" when
1. There was no leak
2. Even if their was and it was a conspiracy or whatever, your lungs have ~no pain receptors and your chest/pleura/etc would generally not hurt from MMA overexposure. Your throat would and your skin would, depending on concentration.
But nobody complained about skin irritation when the is basically no way to end up with one without the other.
Etc.
Sensationalization of this hurt people so far more than the actual issue!
It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).
In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)
In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.
> In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe.
This is common. Isocyanates are a common example — isocyanate monomers are nasty, and the very light ones are very nasty. They’re used to make polyurethane, polyurea and such, which are quite nontoxic in polymerized form.
In applications where the unreacted isocyanates are used by anyone other than professionals (e.g. two component varnishes), the manufacturer may go out of their way to use more expensive but less toxic variants.
Correct, PMMA is completely harmless. MMA is an incredibly common adhesive, and is in probably a dozen things in the room you are sitting in in its polymerized form.
What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation. If we ever get hit by an earthquake or other larger disaster, it's safe to assume we're all on our own.
Also, as someone affected by this, it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
Tangent but there's a great Sublime song titled `Garden Grove`. Looks like they made a modern video for it that presumably shows a lot of Garden Grove. Or it could be Long Beach, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSo_zj0UQw
Here's a fascinating postmortem analysis of two similar incidents, Styrene and Butyl Acrylate:
https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...
From fuzzfactor's comment with lots of other great info:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245
When this is all over, when they peel the metal tank away, will they have a gigantic clear block of material?
World's largest Outstanding Service Award.
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
So... maybe?
Ooh, like when a bottle of Krazy Glue dries out? I kinda hope so...
Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.
There are superglue(CA) accelerators sold, is that just a big scam? Because as far as I can tell a spray bottle with water works just as well.
I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk
Had to look that up. Pretty cool. Would've expected it to be more cloudy. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1ogb2k3/m...
A contractor showed me how to fix dents in granite with superglue. It’s totally clear. The trick is to scrape it with a razor blade at a 90 degree angle (strait horizontal). The imperfections become nearly invisible.
This is also how glass chip repair works. If the polymer has a close enough index of refraction to the glass, it's invisible.
I've been told this is a cheap way to fix small windshield cracks. Never tried it but sounds like it would work for the small spider sized and shaped cracks from small rock impacts.
The expensive way is superglue plus a little suction cup to evacuate the air, and a razor blade.
This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)
And, bringing this topic full circle, the chemical in those kits is methyl methacrylate!
I expect something with a lot of small bubbles and cracks, also it also overheated and got weird decomposition and reactions, something like a overcooked/toasted meal. Reusing a comment that I made in a previous thread:
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
The KRAGLE!
Transparent Aluminum
Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).
Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).
Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.
It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.
> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.
Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:
https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...
The comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245
I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.
I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.
Having the chemical in one location doesn't make it active all over, you need to disperse it. Like you need to shake glow-in-the-dark bracelets.
That is active.
Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).
Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.
Uh, you can't just disconnect a pressurized 35,000 gallon tank and drop it into a an enormous pool you just keep full under it at all times.
I think the passive version is the tank stays in a pool all the time.
Riiight. That is exactly what I was thinking.
It's really unclear what you were thinking
> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.
They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.
Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.
A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.
If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.
The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.
I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.
You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.
"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.
You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.
If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.
[delayed]
But it is a nice dodge for those profiting from outsourcing costs on the public.
From one angle, that is all modern corporations are: a mechanism for offloading costs onto the public, while privately pocketing the profit.
Which is they they all should be regulated to make sure that they're doing more good for society than harm.
Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.
You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.
Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.
Which "Other jurisdictions manage this"?
I have lived in places with more rules, but that meant we just didn't do it. We eventually gave up.
I have read the rules are tighter in most EU nations.
There is jurisdiction shopping of course. If china or wherever wants to have really lax rules, and that means production moves there, I’m not sure what the answer is.
But, for this product (making plexiglass like things), I expect all the consumer production has gone overseas anyway. This is defense / aerospace, so it probably can’t move.
The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.
The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.
By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.
We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.
Consumers don't control zoning laws or risk mitigation details.
I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.
I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!
But then no one would build Jurassic Park. And man, I want to pet Raptors and take selfies with T-Rex you know. Its a conundrum.
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
>Chemical A is found to be cancerous
Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?
> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.
Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
Meanwhile in Washington, an unknown number of people where killed today in a paper mill “white liquor” explosion today…: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/26/longview-chemical-exp...
And for what, $25.00 bucks an hour? We need to take back production.
i always suspected that chemistry was up to something, but never thought it'd be behind something like this.
By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...
> By the miraculous grace of God
Guess He was asleep on the job when the valve broke causing the situation in the first place, but good on Him for intervening later.
Or He felt we needed a small reminder of what we're capable of if not careful!
He never gave us a fucking manual in the first place, so who knows what He is thinking.
> He never gave us a fucking manual in the first place, so who knows what He is thinking.
He did give us a manual. He very clearly says that slavery is okay and eating shrimp is a sin, and lots of other rules.
Slavery is not OK. Someone indentured for owing a debt can be compelled for a maximum of six years and goes free in the seventh, with no payment required from him.
You sure? I got a manual that has lined up with expectations thus far.
It's ok to just treat it like a thing people say. When people say 'bless you' I don't explain to them that sneezing doesn't actually expel my soul from my body.
BLEVE = Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion
My parents are retired fire-fighters. They had an American pygmy goat named Bleve. Those goats commonly have very rotund stomachs[1] that look like they are about to explode.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:American_Pygmy_G...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGWmONHipVo
MythBusters have a good BLEVE episode. Apparently Adam Savage's favourite explosion.
Typically BLEVE is used in a petrochemical context, where the hot "boiling liquid, expanding vapor" ignites on contact with oxygen.
A BLEVE does not need oxygen to become an explosion. The explosion occurs with the rupture of a tank (that has been heated, increasing the internal pressure and thus increasing the boiling point of the liquid inside, so that it remains liquid). This causes a loss of rapid loss of pressure, which in turn rapidly decreases the boiling point of the liquid, thus causing a sizable part of the liquid to almost immediately boil and cause an expanding "cloud" of gas.
When this occurs, you have an explosion that can propel parts of a steel propane tank up to 1/2 mile (at least).
It doesn't need it but it makes it that much more destructive. Your propane example is such a case - as the hot cloud expands explosively it burns on contact with new oxygen and the heat serves to further perpetuate the process. An overheated tank of propane provides an illustration of the principle on which thermobaric warheads are based.
> A leak was detected in one of the fittings and an attempt was made to correct it by striking the fitting with a large wrench.
https://darwinawards.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
Seems more like the miraculous grace of incompetence and no maintenance. You ever have a problem at work and you procrastinate long enough and it just sort of goes away for “reasons”? This kind of reminds me of that. Not maintaining the valve was saved by taking even worse care of the tank.
Not only that, but "there's a gas leak, let's strike it with a wrench" is one of the more interesting attempts I've heard of to win a Darwin award.
It worked
Is this satire?
I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack?
Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.
If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas.
Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds break which then passes the stress on to the material straight after that. This all happens very quickly and can even accelerate as the hole grows bigger and gas starts moving.
It’s very lucky that the crack that formed didn’t propagate like that. It could be for many reasons though, like the crack front could have run into thicker material or a weld line or something like that and if luckily stopped the crack.
Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.
[1] This is the hazchem code. I think the US uses a different system. A list is here: https://www.ricardo.com/media/radn55jg/dangerous-goods-emerg...
The US uses the Emergency Response Guide or ERG, which similarly lists more or less all hazardous materials and suggests appropriate responses.
Full document is here: https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/sites/phmsa.dot.gov/files/2024-04/...
Relevant guide is 129, which is on PDF page 189.
---------
SPILL OR LEAK
• ELIMINATE all ignition sources (no smoking, flares, sparks or flames) from immediate area.
• All equipment used when handling the product must be grounded.
• Do not touch or walk through spilled material. • Stop leak if you can do it without risk. • Prevent entry into waterways, sewers, basements or confined areas.
• A vapor-suppressing foam may be used to reduce vapors.
• Absorb or cover with dry earth, sand or other non-combustible material and transfer to containers.
• Use clean, non-sparking tools to collect absorbed material.
Large Spill
• Dike far ahead of liquid spill for later disposal.
• Water spray may reduce vapor, but may not prevent ignition in closed spaces.
---------
The spark could have caused an explosion.
I read that was the primary concern and wondered about drilling/piercing techniques that could avoid a spark. Spraying water sounds like the dumbest one but some kind of mud applied or something. CNC machines don’t seem to be light shows but i know very little.
My "I have no clue how this works" proposal to minimize the chance of sparking would be to re-purpose a waterjet cutter...
Okay now hear me out. What about we introduce more chemicals and eat through the tank with acid?
I guess that begs the next point though - the high pressure system inside would want to violently vent out to the low pressure system outside through the relatively tiny hole.
Delta P... when it's got you... it's got you.
Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates:
https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-ex...
This agency is the subject of a budget war between the current executive and Congress, with the former trying to cut its budget and the Congress just restoring its budget, so not sure if it will be doing a report on Garden Grove:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/congress-rescues-industr...
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904017
What the...?!
I was literally just this afternoon telling someone about TIWWW and posting them some favourites.
> The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,
The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?
Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.
On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.
I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.
It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).
So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.
You've got the right idea with the LD50 but the catch is that if it ignites it produces things that are acutely toxic in relatively small quantities.
MMA is not very toxic. It has the same LD50 as vitamin C. Table salt and baking soda are twice as toxic as MMA, for example.
Additionally it is almost certainly not in vapor form at 100 degrees. In sunlight it will also polymerize to a solid pretty quickly.
As such you'd practically have to drink it inside to hit the ld50.
The explosion would be much worse than a release of liquid or vapor based MMA during the day, and here it almost certainly solidified at this point
MMA can apparently cause some issues that are more subtle than death. I would MUCH rather eat 1g of vitamin C than 1g of MMA.
Also, vitamin C is not volatile, so there is no risk of inhaling it as a gas.
Sure it can. So can Vitamin C though.
The overall point remains the same: the toxicity, both short and long term, of MMA, is comparable to lots of everyday substances that are both commonly eaten and inhaled.
It just isn't that toxic as far as chemicals go. That doesn't mean it would be like great for you but calling it "highly toxic" is tremendously overblown and doesnt serve anyone well to claim.
Let's save the highly toxic claim for things that actually deserve it. We don't have to sensationalize everything. I maintain my view that the explosion would likely be much much worse than the odds of significant respiratory damage from MMA.
Also note the sensationalization also causes placebo effect. People miles away started claiming "their lungs hurt" when
1. There was no leak
2. Even if their was and it was a conspiracy or whatever, your lungs have ~no pain receptors and your chest/pleura/etc would generally not hurt from MMA overexposure. Your throat would and your skin would, depending on concentration. But nobody complained about skin irritation when the is basically no way to end up with one without the other.
Etc.
Sensationalization of this hurt people so far more than the actual issue!
It produces highly toxic byproducts when it burns thus the exposure concerns.
It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).
In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)
In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.
> In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe.
This is common. Isocyanates are a common example — isocyanate monomers are nasty, and the very light ones are very nasty. They’re used to make polyurethane, polyurea and such, which are quite nontoxic in polymerized form.
In applications where the unreacted isocyanates are used by anyone other than professionals (e.g. two component varnishes), the manufacturer may go out of their way to use more expensive but less toxic variants.
Correct, PMMA is completely harmless. MMA is an incredibly common adhesive, and is in probably a dozen things in the room you are sitting in in its polymerized form.
> insanely toxic
Some quick searching suggests that it’s toxic but not even close to “insanely toxic”. And it’s not persistent in the environment.
If you want a genuinely nasty chemical, check out methyl isocyanate, which is some two orders of magnitude more acutely toxic.
I'll see your CH3NCO, and raise (CH3)2Hg -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury#Safety
- considerably more deadlier, and the mercury an element - so no clever chemical reactions can break it down into innocuous CO2, H2O, and N2.
What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation. If we ever get hit by an earthquake or other larger disaster, it's safe to assume we're all on our own.
Also, as someone affected by this, it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
> What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation.
Can you expand on that? It seems like there wasn't a lot they could do once the tank started leaking.
vague post
Tangent but there's a great Sublime song titled `Garden Grove`. Looks like they made a modern video for it that presumably shows a lot of Garden Grove. Or it could be Long Beach, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSo_zj0UQw